Friday, May 12, 2017

Fugues From a Darkening Island:

First Quarter Report (DELAYED).

Given my by now expected tardiness when it comes to producing new content for this permanently-on-life-support blog, I found it frustrating that, whilst I was slowly ploughing through that best of 2016 list earlier this year, the first quarter of 2017 was simultaneously hitting me with a wealth of great new(ish) music – all of which helped cheer me somewhat whilst trudging through one of the most dire and baleful winters this ship-of-fools planet has experienced within living memory.

Though my burning need to tell you about all this was forced into hibernation as a result of other life commitments, I’ve FINALLY found a few minutes to bang something out for you before a big trip to Japan later this month puts things on hiatus again, so let’s get cracking.

As it happens, what follows is almost exclusively gnarly guitar stuff, and exclusively from within the night-haunted shores of the British Isles, so if that doesn’t sound like your cup of teeth, well… sorry. Things are looking pretty grim around here at the mo, so if you’re looking for something a bit more laidback and nuanced, might I recommend, say, Philadelphia in the 1970s? I mean, those guys seemed to know how to put their troubles in perspective and kick back in style. Here in 2017 however, the clock appears to be ticking, so we’ve got to take advantage of all this electricity and sweat-shop produced ‘gear’ and moan about it whilst we still can.

Grey Hairs.

Grey Hairs’ 2nd LP ‘Serious Business’, out now on Gringo, is the band’s best recorded statement to date. At this point, they can pretty much be considered national standard bearers for the virtues of keeping it real and making excellent rock music on a sustainable/local level, and I hope I will remain in the spirit of the “shit, suddenly we’re middle aged” aesthetic they have been rocking since their inception if I state that the pleasures of this album largely arise from the opportunity to hear group with enough of a collective track record behind them to know how to do things right, just doing things right.

A big, ol’ reeking mess of a record in the best possible sense, the essence of ‘Serious Business’ is difficult to capture in a few glib sentences (an undoubted strength, although a bit of a pain in the arse when it comes to writing this sort of thing). Swinging from Melvins/Black Flag level heft on the one hand to a cannier, more sprightly approach that puts me in mind of the much missed Eddy Current Suppression Ring on the other, the ‘Hairs strong suit here is a solid & considered approach to song-writing that matches painstakingly hewn-from-cliff-face riffs with imaginatively tangled bits of guitar-work, appropriately bludgeoning/dramatic production decisions and vocalist James’s fairly unique approach to rock band front-person conventions.

This sees him mixing scale-climbing alt-rock emoting with a desperate/oddball sense of humour that helps make his tales of collapsing/self-pitying austerity-era masculinity not only palatable, but weirdly enjoyable. A shrieked “Sick! / Sick of feeling shit! / Sick of talking it!” aptly sets the scene on the self-titled opener, whilst ‘Man is a Kitchen’ – a definite highlight in all regards – appears to concern itself with the daily torment of cooking dinner (“Meat! Takes! TIME!”). [I realise that, in the context of a rock song, such talk of meat and ovens could be taken as a precursor to some kind of loathsomely ungainly double entendre, but I can’t be the only one who would rather take it at face value in this instance.]

I’m talking a fair bit of shit myself here it seems, and could probably continue doing so for a while longer, so instead let’s cut to the chase here and just say that, in ‘Serious Business’, Grey Hairs have achieved the seemingly impossible by perfecting a form of all purpose, non-denominational “modern rock” that feels valid, exhilarating, non-embarrassing and GOOD. And they’re fucking great live too. Just have a listen, will you?

Lower Slaughter.

I somehow missed out on seeing Brighton’s Lower Slaughter back when they were playing with their former vocalist Max Levy (aka King of Cats), but I’ve been lucky enough to catch them twice this year with Sinead Young (ex-Divorce) on the mic, and I have found them to be bloody brilliant, bordering on hit-the-mosh-pit-if-there-was-one inspiring, on both occasions.

Like Grey Hairs, Lower Slaughter are an adaptable, non-retro-fixated modern rock unit that just works. I mean, what can you say? A wrecking ball rhythm section, a rad/inventive guitarist, a charismatic front person with a good set of pipes – it’s not exactly rocket science, is it? But rarely these days are the elements all in place just so. Go see them play, and witness some serious, original, yet exultantly rocking, rock music being made. It’s great.

Only one track featuring their new line-up out in the wild thus far, on a four way split 7”, but it’s a blinder, and they’ve got an LP on the way shortly, so I’m looking forward.

(The photo above is by Isobel Reddington by the way, shamelessly googled up and stolen from The Quietus to cover for the lack of any appropriate record covers.)

Sissy.

Another band sharing that split 7” with Lower Slaughter are Dublin’s Sissy, and I’ve got to admit that, whilst on paper they don’t sound much like a group that would pique my interest much these days, they absolutely “killed it” (as the kids may or may not be saying) when I saw them headlining a night at the DIY Space a few months back.

It’s difficult to really put yr finger on what separates them so definitively from every other ‘songwriter plus rhythm section’ pop-punk three piece in the world, but, after beginning proceedings with a concise “we’re from Ireland, but we don’t like the church”, Sissy played with a sheer… I dunno, ‘confidence’ is the only word I can think of, though it feels woefully insufficient… that is rare indeed, and worthy of celebration.

Lyrics on the band’s most recent EP (released in 2015 apparently… what the heck have they been doing since?!) are straight up feminist agit prop with a particular emphasis on the issues faced by women in the Republic of Ireland, aimed twist-the-knife style at any potential detractors and even getting down to the nitty gritty of such specifics as the lack of female sports coverage on TV at one point – pretty on-the-nose kinda fare, but, they sell it. The concerns are legit, the rage is real, the performance holds up.

Despite the clean guitar tone, watching Sissy put me in mind of what it might have been like to catch ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana, with a nice dose of first wave UK punk directness in the mix, and, at the risk of being hit with the comparing-female-bands-to-other-female-bands stick, a fair bit of first album-era Sleater Kinney too. (Oof, good luck shouldering those expectations guys!) Ignore at your peril, and so forth.

The Suburban Homes.

Speaking both of first wave UK punk directness, it actually took nods from as far away as Japan and the USA to point me in the direction of The Suburban Homes, an outfit based out of Crawley, West Sussex, who put out a splendid 12” entitled ‘..Are Bored’ late last year.

Sound here is somewhat akin to early Television Personalities if they’d turned away from their mod/psyche/cutie fixations and instead ploughed an ever-deepening furrow of punk rock indignation [as if to prove my point, a re-worked cover of ‘Part Time Punks’ is included with the download version], or Billy Childish’s Pop Rivets if they’d done, well, much the same.

To echo a notion that seems to apply to most of the bands I’m writing about in this post, it’s difficult to articulate quite what makes these songs so vital as they rattle through the familiar monotone, three chord Messthetics sweet-spots like an out of control mini-moke careering through a sink estate, but, heaven help us, they hit the spot.

The disgruntled Punk 101 sentiments of screeds like ‘Barbie & Ken’ and ‘iPhone Suicide’ should be any reasonable measure be considered hopelessly redundant – condemned to the realm of Mr Local Bloke, fourth on the bill at the Dog & Duck, who’s been listening to The Clash and decided he’s got a bone to pick – yet somehow here, they still ring true, caustic, disenfranchised and ready for trouble.

I think perhaps the key to it is that, in contrast to the vast majority of other punk rock bands, The Suburban Homes actually sound as if they’re coming from a place where the very act of making this music or expressing these opinions makes them genuine outcasts from the society around them – as lonely and embittered as a mohawked oik dodging rocks in some provincial bus queue back in ’78.

By adopting such a militant “back to basics” approach, The Suburban Homes dodge the retro bullet and instead succeed in dragging punk-as-genre back from the echo chamber of unreadable jacket patches and endless self-referential permutations of badly recorded caveman nonsense, and reminding us why it appealed in the first place.

Unless of course, they are actually just a bunch of urbane metropolitan elitos like myself, pulling this ‘provincial amateur punk’ shtick just to take the piss – which is always a possibility in these dark days.

Either way, my wife bought a copy of their record via bandcamp and the package arrived with “THE SUBURBAN HOMES HATE SOCIAL MEDIA” written on the back in biro, so - truly they are fighting the good fight.

Casual Nun.

I first saw Casual Nun supporting Bong a while back, and they were pretty good. In the past six months, they’ve released two separate LPs (both recorded on the same day), and they’ve evidently upped their game to the level of ‘pretty great’.

Of the two, Super Fancy Skeleton (hard copy released via Hominid Sounds) is the one I’ve spent most time with, and it finds the band expending on their palette of Heads-style rehearsal room riffola to incorporate distant groans of mechanised insectoid angst, “eastern-tinged”, the-Egyptian-gods-are-rising-to-eat-you style psyche-doom atmos, and even warped ancestral memories of Glitter Band stomp and Quo-ian boogie. It’s a pretty eclectic brew all things considered, with the album’s four tracks anchored only by the presence of a pair of guitarists who sound like they would rather die by the sword than dial down their fuzz. Nice one.

On first approach, Psychometric Testing by.. (Box) seems to venture even further afield, beginning, somewhat unexpectedly, with ninety seconds of punishing, pedal-warped hardcore before another mammoth doom plod gets underway, belying any “Bong on the cheap” accusations with a genuinely massive sound-mix, swallowing all light in the immediate vicinity, much in the way such things should. By the end, there’s what sounds like a whole cell full of unhappy prisoners wailing down a wind tunnel in the depths of the mix, as somewhat gives a distorted theremin a good seeing to in the foreground.

Raw electronic textures of the kind Hawkwind’s audio generators might have belched up get an outing on ‘Truth Machines’, before the track departs for stranger realms of malfunctioning/medicated improv freakout before eventually working its way round to a few minutes of the kind of head-nodding action Endless Boogie might sanction. Then some heavy duty effects plough in again and…. before too long, spoken word starts happening. Blimey. Let’s just say that, more so than its predecessor, this record is quite a trip – a rusty, soggy, dangerous, fungus encrusted, subterranean one, specifically speaking, but well worth taking nonetheless.

Aggressive Perfector.

As long-term readers will be aware, when it comes to metal (as opposed to doom, for which I apply different criteria), I like it straight up, punk-spirited, unpretentious, beer-sodden and direct from the practice room. So when I saw that Manchester-based Aggressive Perfector had hand-drawn a scary demon on the cover of their debut EP and (anti)christened it ‘Satan’s Heavy Metal’, I figured I might be on to a winner, and verily, they did not disappoint.

Not much to say about this one, beyond the fact that it just fucking rips, with the opening ‘Infernal Raids’ standing out as one of the most kick ass metal songs I’ve heard in years. Though they prostrate themselves before all the expected altars (Slayer, Venom, Cryptic Slaughter, more Slayer, even a touch of Di’Anno-era Maiden perhaps?), Aggressive Perfector aren’t bogged down in nostalgia, and neither to they play like posers – this is a razor sharp, band-live-in-the-room mid-fi blast that as far as I’m concerned represents the spirit of heavy metal at its finest. I haven’t had this much fun since I discovered the Blood Patrol demo. All hail!

Skullflower.

Last but certainly not least, I’ve recently found myself reconnecting with the contemporary output of Skullflower [hopefully a no-intro-needed level prospect, but if you do need one, try here]. Still comprising a duo of Matthew Bower and partner Samantha Davies, it transpires that the band (if we can indeed properly deem them such) have recently been unloading a prodigious quantities of new material via their bandcamp page, and simultaneously holding forth on their mystifying yet beguilingly poetical take on spirituality on their blog,whilst, admirably, cementing real world connections in such unfashionable locales as Russia and Egypt.

It is the latter that leads us to the release I would particularly like to highlight here, ‘The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within (Bear It or Be It)’, issued earlier this year on Cairo-based Nashazphone label – one of the few Skullflower releases to hit vinyl within living memory, and deservedly so, for it is an astonishing piece of work.

Very much the kind of deal wherein trying to break the music within down to verbal descriptors feels both reductive and somewhat sacrilegious, let’s just say that ‘The Black Iron..’ finds Skullflower expressing the more expansive and less punishing (relatively speaking) side of the nature. I spent some quality time with it a few weeks back, sitting between the speakers with a glass of scotch, and I’ve not been quite the same since. The first side in particular is… something else.

The record is not currently available digitally and Nashazphone’s pressing was limited to 333 copies, but there are still some on offer via Discogs at the time of writing, so please – “don’t sleep”, as the collector bores say. (You can hear some of it on Youtube here.)